Consumed: A MMA Sports Romance (51 page)

I shook my head; his coaches would have
had to have known that Zack was partying. Of course, with pictures of
potentially underage drinking coming out, I could see why they were worried—and
why they might suspend him, even if it cost us the big national championship.
They had to at least look like they were being tough on underage drinking and
too much partying. But my eyes went back to the picture and I felt my concern
for Zack dissolve in a bitter thought. That girl, grinding on him, grinning
like she was absolutely certain that she’d be getting him alone in next to no
time. Zack had told me he couldn’t think about anyone but me—he had humiliated
himself, and me, to demonstrate he had feelings for me. What the hell was he
doing letting some girl grind up on him, practically rubbing his toga off, if
that was the case?

SLAMMED #4

CHAPTER
ONE

For what felt like a long time, I stared
at the newspaper that Jess had given me, looking at the picture as my stomach
churned. I’d had no idea that the morning was going to bring anything like
this. My mind swirled around, alternating between fear and worry for Zack’s
position—the possibility that he might be suspended from the team—and growing
anger at the sight of a woman grinding up on him. The alcohol didn’t bother me
in the slightest; I knew that Zack had started drinking before he even came to
college, and the whole point of the frat he belonged to was to party as much as
humanly possible.

“I don’t understand,” I said finally,
looking from the paper to Jess. “I mean, I really just don’t understand.”

Jess sat down heavily, shrugging. “The
school has to look like they’ll only tolerate a certain level of partying, and
someone I guess turned Zack in.”

“But…” I shook my head, staring at the
picture once more. Had I seen the girl before? Was she one of the girls that
seemed to always be around Zack? Had he slept with her? When was the picture
from—it had to have been recent to have been included in the article. “Who the
hell is that and what is Zack doing letting her be all over him like that?”

Jess shrugged again. “I’d seen Zack around
a few times before, and I mean, he’s sort of always been like that—wild,
partying, hitting up whatever girl would pay him the least bit of attention. I
mean, until you showed up, at least.”

I bit my bottom lip and put the newspaper
down. I felt hot and cold all at once, my heart pounding in my chest, my head
already starting to ache. Zack had been like this before I came back into the
picture. He had fooled around with girls, let them grind up on him—well, in
fairness, I thought, he and I had danced just like that the first time he had
seen me in years; why should I be surprised? I shouldn’t. But it still hurt;
especially since I had no idea if the picture was from long before I had come
back into his life or if it was from earlier in the night during the party I’d
gone to find him at. I couldn’t think straight—my head was spinning.

“Do you think I made a huge mistake
getting back into his life?” I asked Jess. “I mean, that’s not the kind of
person I am—do you think…do you think that’s the kind of girl he wants?”

Jess shook her head. “He knows what kind
of girl you are and he clearly wants you. What are you so upset about, Evie?”

I swallowed against the tightness I could
feel growing steadily worse in my throat. “I’m upset at the sight of the guy I
like being dry-humped by some girl!” I said, standing up and pacing across the
living room floor. “I mean, yeah, sure, whatever, double-fisting beers is an
old hat trick, I’ve seen him doing that before. It’s not news. But what if he’s
doing this…what if he’s still going after any girl who’ll pay attention to
him?”

I thought of seeing him in the dining hall
line with his arm around a girl, just a couple of days after we’d had sex for
the first time in years. I thought of him telling me it was just sex.

But he’d acted differently since, hadn’t
he? He’d asked me out on a proper date, he’d declared he was hung up on me in
front of everyone. I’d been humiliated by the way he acted, but he was just
showing off, just trying to get my attention. If he was really serious about
having a relationship with me I could forgive him for what he’d done. But if he
was dancing and flirting with other girls while keeping me on the line as a
steady lay—if all I was to him was a reliable piece of ass—then I couldn’t
stand that.

“Is that what you think is happening?”
Jess asked me.

I shrugged, throwing my arms out wildly.
“I have no fucking clue!” I ran my hands through my hair, trying to decide what
I thought. “I just…he’s right there, some slut grabbing on him, and they
probably slept together, and I don’t know whether it was from months ago or
last year or last week!”

“Last week, if it was then, you were
freezing him out.”

“What if it was the night of the party?
What if he was grinding on that girl and hooked up with her and then got rid of
her before I got there to talk to him.”

“Busy guy, then,” Jess said, smiling
faintly.

“This isn’t funny, Jess!” Jess’ smile fell
and she nodded. “On top of all that he might be getting suspended from the
football team, and I don’t know how to feel about that…” I threw myself down on
the couch. “What do I do, Jess? This is just…I can’t even handle everything
going on in my brain right now.”

“First, take a chill pill. If Zack gets
suspended from the team then I sure as hell hope they have a backup plan
because I can’t think of any way they’ll manage in the championship without
him.” Jess paused a moment to think before continuing. “As for the rest of it,
I mean, are you really not okay with him drinking and partying? You’re worried
about the kind of girl that he wants you to be—but are you okay with the kind
of guy he is?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “If he’s the
kind of guy—still—who would let girls get all up on him and rub up against him
even if he’s with someone…with me…then no. But I don’t know.”

“You need to figure out what kind of guy
he is, and you need to figure out if you’re okay with the kind of guy he is. I
mean it. I can see you’re serious about him, but if he isn’t serious about you,
you’re never going to be okay with that.” I nodded. “So figure it out, Evie,
and do what makes sense from there.” Jess stood up, stretching. “Try and get
some breakfast in your system before class.”

I went into my room, still shaking with
anger and upset. I should change out of my pajamas and get to the dining hall,
get ready for the rest of my day. I should just put the picture I had seen and
the article I had read completely out of my mind until I could talk to Zack
about it. But my heart was pounding in my chest and I couldn’t take my mind off
of the picture. I couldn’t stop thinking about the lurid details that the
article had featured, the highlights of the frat’s history.
“In 2004, the fraternity was the subject of
a long investigation by the administration when an early-admission student,
aged 15, told her parents that she had had sex with one of the members of the
frat…In 2010, the frat was once more temporarily suspended pending the verdict
in allegations of underage drinking and public lewdness, with several students
alleging that public sex occurred during at least one party…”
Zack hadn’t
been a member of the frat for the worst of the infractions, but the frat’s
reputation lent itself well to encouraging someone like Zack to do whatever he
wanted.

I pulled at my hair, groaning as I buried
my face against my mattress. The thought of seeing Zack with another girl—both
the way I had in real life, just a few short days after we had first reunited
and then in the picture—made me angrier and angrier. I couldn’t put it out of
my mind; it was impossible. I stood up and took a deep breath. I would have to
actually confront him about it. There was just no two ways about it. I had to
do it before I could psych myself out, before I had a chance to make myself
miserable during my morning classes dwelling on it.

I strode out of my room, stepping into a
pair of slip-on shoes and grabbing up the newspaper that Jess had brought in
from the coffee table where I’d let it fall. I made sure to grab my keys and
card so I wouldn’t be locked out of the dorms, but I didn’t make time or take
time for anything else. As I walked down the hall to the stairwell, I
considered where I could actually find Zack. It was early enough in the morning
that my first thought was that he would be at the frat house, still asleep. But
then I corrected myself; Zack had told me about his training routine in our
interview together. He and the team would be in the school gym, in the weight
room, working out.

I walked across campus, ignoring the chill
in the air that cut through my pajamas and barely looking around me. It was
early enough in the day that there weren’t very many people up and about; there
was no one to see how upset I was at the whole situation. I caught sight of a
few people rushing to early-morning classes in their pajamas, or heading for
the dining hall, but anyone who was out of the dorms and the frats that early
in the morning was focused entirely on themselves. As I walked I got more and
more upset; how could Zack have led me on, if this was the kind of playing
around he did? He and I—I thought—had had something special. The words from one
of his frat brothers, the first night we had seen each other since we’d broken
up in high school, filled my head. Zack was one of those guys, the kind I had
started to avoid. All I was to him was a piece of ass—and that’s all I was to
his frat brothers; another one of Zack’s conquests.

It was easy to get into the gym; the card
that let me into the dorm building was just as effective on the locked doors in
the rec center. As soon as I got into the nearly-vacant building, I could hear
the hard workouts going on in the weight room. The entire team would be there.
For just a moment I checked, remembering just how much I hated making a public
spectacle of myself—and how much I had hated Zack for making me a public
spectacle the two times he had done it. But I knew I couldn’t wait. If I waited
and let myself cool off, I’d accept any explanation from Zack and never get to
the bottom of the situation. I plunged into the weight room and looked around.

It wasn’t just the football team on the
machines and using the free weights; the basketball team was also in the room,
going through their own paces—some of them on treadmills, some of them on
bikes, most of them lifting weights heavy enough to daunt me. I moved through
the room as quickly as possible, ignoring the eddying pause of conversation all
around me as I looked around for Zack. He was lying on a bench, a heavy weight
hooked on a bar over him, getting ready to do presses.

“Zack!” I called out, intending only to
get his attention before he started; but my voice was shriller, sharper than I
wanted it to be. Zack started, pulling his hands back from the barbell as if it
was hot. Looking around, he spotted me and grinned.

“Hey, Evie,” he said, slipping out from
underneath the bar and standing up quickly. “I can’t really talk now—but I can
hit you up right after class.”

I shook my head, my heart pounding in my
chest. I could feel everyone looking at us, but I couldn’t make myself stop
long enough to calm down and think about the best way to do what I needed to
do.

“What the hell is this?” I asked, waving
the newspaper in front of his face. Zack grabbed at it, looking at the picture
and article. He went red, and then white.

“This is just some bullshit about them
wanting to suspend me, it’s no big deal, Evie—”

I let out a little shriek. “I don’t care
about that! If you get suspended it’s your own fucking fault!” I pointed at the
picture hard enough to almost rip the paper. “That. That. What is it?”

Zack looked at the picture and frowned.
“Evie, this is from a long time ago, I don’t even know…”

I closed my eyes. I was shaking with rage,
my eyes stinging with tears that I couldn’t let myself shed in front of half
the school’s athletics department.

“You don’t even know who she is, do you?
Do you even care? Is that all I am to you too—just another girl to grab and
fool around with?” Zack’s face got redder and redder and I saw him looking
around at his teammates, at the members of the basketball team watching avidly.

“That’s not what I was going to say and
you know it,” Zack said, his voice dropping low. “I don’t know who took this
picture, but it’s from forever ago.”

I shook my head. “I don’t believe you. I
thought you were different! I thought you gave a damn—I thought…” I shook my
head again. “You’re just a stupid asshole like every other guy I’ve ever dated.
Well, I hope you enjoyed it, because I’m not going to be your piece of ass
anymore.”

I turned around quickly. My heart was
pounding and my eyes were burning, and all I could think of was getting out of
there before someone saw me breaking into tears. I hurried out of the weight
room and through the rec center, swallowing down the tightness in my throat and
trying to keep my trembling to myself.

I nearly ran across campus, slowing down
only when I started to get a stitch in my side, avoiding looking at anyone that
might be around as the tears started falling from my eyes before I got to the
safety of my room. I couldn’t believe that I had actually thought Zack thought
I was special, that I had let myself get suckered into falling for another guy
who was just going to take whatever piece of tail came his way without any
concern at all for my feelings. My hands shook as I tried to swipe my card to
get into the building; it took me three tries before I was finally able to get
the reader to scan my card properly.

I stepped onto the elevator and hit the
door close button over and over again; the last thing I wanted was to have to
deal with someone riding with me, watching me as I tried to hold myself
together. I sagged against the wall of the elevator, against the railing,
shuddering and still angry, still hurt. I tried stalling the tears that were
already starting to spill out of my eyes. When the elevator finally managed to
make it up to my floor, I hurried off, towards my room, not even bothering to
tell Jess what I’d done or that I was back—she’d hear the door. I threw myself
onto my bed and gave into the sobs that were pushing up through my chest,
burying my face in my pillow. Hot tears flowed into the fabric and I shook with
anger and depression, not quite wanting to scream in my frustration.

I lost all track of time, lying there and
sobbing my eyes out, punching the mattress and grabbing at the pillow I’d
buried my face in. After a while it finally started to dawn on me that before I
had seen the newspaper article featuring Zack, I had been waking up, getting
ready to go to class. I had class to get to.

 
I
pulled myself up and looked at the clock; I had been crying for almost an hour,
and now I only had ten minutes to get to class, all the way across campus. I
had no time to get dressed. I sighed, grabbing up my backpack and shoving my
journalism textbooks into it. At least, I thought, half the student body went
to class in their pajamas, especially the morning classes; no one was likely to
notice that I wasn’t fully dressed.

I hurried across campus, trying to focus
my thoughts down on the class I was going to; I had missed my window for
grabbing breakfast, so I would have to hope I had a little bit of time to get
something to eat from one of the vending machines between morning classes or by
the time lunch rolled around I would be totally useless. I hoped against hope
that my face wasn’t too red, that my eyes weren’t too obviously bloodshot. My
little spectacle in the weight room would already be making the rounds among
the campus gossipmongers—the last thing I needed was for everyone to see me
cried out, panicking that I wasn’t getting to class on time, and thinking that
the whole reason for my upset was Zack.

I took my usual seat in class, feeling
oddly conspicuous in spite of the fact that half the people in the room with me
were also in their pajamas. Professor Grant came in a few minutes late,
apologizing and looking around with a faint grin curving his lips.

“I can see that everyone’s starting to get
a little less formal now that we’re past midterms,” he said, looking at the
other people in the room, but not—fortunately—at me.

During the lecture, I tried to take notes
but my mind kept going back to Zack. Why had I thought that he was any
different from any of the guys I had ever dated? Because he’d been my first? I
was an idiot. I should have known that Zack didn’t belong to the Phi Alpha
Kappa group for no reason—he had loved to party even when we’d been in high
school together, and clearly he’d just gone on doing that, getting more and
more outrageous as he went. Hooking up with an ex-girlfriend wasn’t going to
change that about him. I remembered Jess’ advice that I should figure out what
kind of person Zack really was and decide if I was okay with it. I thought to
myself that I had been acting like an idiot the whole time leading up to seeing
that picture. I had believed that sure, Zack was rowdy and liked to get drunk
and hang out with a bunch of guys who viewed women as conquests—but why would
he hang out with people like that if he didn’t agree?

Zack had never really seen me as anything
other than another girl to get with. The thought of it made me sick. I had let
myself start to think of Zack as really special—as someone who wanted me
because of who I am, who knew me and who wanted me. In reality he was just the
same as any guy; he just wanted a girl he could convince to sleep with him on
the regular, who he could toss aside when it was inconvenient. How much longer
would I have kept going with him if I hadn’t seen that article and that
picture?

I thought about everything that Zack and I
had been through in the previous weeks, and I couldn’t make sense of it. If he
really didn’t care about me, why had he performed so poorly when I had ignored
him? He could have easily just moved on to someone else. But what if it was
just a coincidence? If he had performed poorly because he’d had some other girl
distracting him—and not because of me at all. Part of my brain argued that he
had tried really hard to get in touch with me even when I was ignoring him,
working hard to avoid even seeing him on campus. But had he really? He’d sent
me some texts and made some phone calls, and had left a note on my door. I’d
been avoiding him, but I had still kept to my usual routine; if he had wanted
to find me, he could have gone to the Library, or the dining hall, any number
of times and tracked me down.

I didn’t know how to feel about the weird
mixed signals in my mind. I was glad I’d remembered my recorder; I kept it on
my desk, knowing that I wouldn’t remember a damned thing about Grant’s lecture
with the situation with Zack at the top of my mind, consuming my thoughts. I
was barely even able to keep up with the notes on the board—I wondered at one
point what I was even doing in class when I wasn’t getting anything out of it
at all. But I was present.

I managed to grab a bag of chips from the
vending machine on my way from Introduction to Journalism to English
Literature; my stomach was twisting and grumbling inside of me, uncaring about
the fact that I was trying to cope with the confrontation between Zack and me.
I didn’t even taste the chips as I brought them to my mouth, pretending to pay
attention to the discussion about Jane Austen, but still dwelling on the
details of everything that had happened. I thought about how good the sex had
been, my insecure jealousy at the thought that Zack had to have been with other
women to have improved so much since we’d been together. That should have been
my first red flag—the fact that Zack had gotten so much better at sex itself.

It seemed like I had been getting cues,
hints, indications all the time about what Zack really was, and totally
ignoring them in the face of what I wanted them to be. I had to face facts:
Zack didn’t have any special attachment to me and he didn’t particularly care
about keeping me as a girlfriend. I didn’t even know if he actually saw me as a
girlfriend. I had been fooling myself all along and I should have stayed away
when his team mate suggested it—even if his teammate had the interests of the
team in mind instead of my own.

I decided after class that I didn’t want
to see or talk to anyone. I went to the dining hall and scanned my card and
took to-go containers, making a minimum of eye contact as I got into the line.
I got a bowl of soup and a sandwich and then found myself loading brownies,
cookies, anything remotely sweet and fattening into my box to take with me. I
would have to make it to my afternoon classes, but I was going to stay in my
room until the last possible moment and no one was going to stop me. I kept my
head down all the way to the dorms, cradling my food close to me and not
responding to anyone who seemed like they were trying to get my attention. I
could only imagine what the team had said about my appearance in the weight
room. I could only imagine what everyone on campus was saying about me—how
stupid I’d been, what a crazy fool I was to think that Zack was anything other
than a partying frat boy. I decided that I was going to stick with eating in my
room, going to the library
 
and my
classes and otherwise just avoiding anyone. And if Jess tried to convince me to
go to any more parties, I was going to tell her to go to hell.